Stories of Inventors: The Adventures of Inventors and Engineers

by Russell Doubleday

It was shortly afterward, while the royal yacht was in Cowes Bay, that one hundred and fifty messages between the then Prince of Wales and his royal mother at Osborne House were exchanged, most of them of a very private nature.

One of the great objections to wireless telegraphy has been the inability to make it secret, since the ether waves circle from the centre in all directions, and any receiving apparatus within certain limits would be affected by the waves just as the station to which the message was sent would be affected by them. To illustrate: the waves radiating from a stone dropped into a still pool would make a dead leaf bob up and down anywhere on the pool within the circle of the waves, and so the ether waves excited the receiving apparatus of any station within the effective reach of the circle.

Of course, the use of a cipher code would secure the secrecy of a message, but Marconi was looking for a mechanical device that would make it impossible for any but the station to which the message was sent to receive it. He finally hit upon the plan of focussing the ether waves as the rays of a searchlight are concentrated in a given direction by the use of a reflector, and though this adaptation of the searchlight principle was to a certain extent successful, much penetrating power was lost. This plan has been abandoned for one much more ingenious and effective, based on the principle of attunement, of which more later.

It was a proud day for the young Italian when his receiver at Dover recorded the first wireless message sent across the British Channel from Boulogne in 1899—just the letters V M and three or four words in the Morse alphabet of dots and dashes. He had bridged that space of stormy, restless water with an invisible, intangible something that could be neither seen, felt, nor heard, and yet was stronger and surer than steel—a connection that nothing could interrupt, that no barrier could prevent. The first message from England to France was soon followed by one to M. Branly, the inventor of the coherer, that made the receiving of the message possible, and one to the queen of Marconi's country. The inventor's march of progress was rapid after this—stations were established at various points all around the coast of England; vessels were equipped with the apparatus so that they might talk to the mainland and to one another. England's great dogs of war, her battle-ships, fought an imaginary war with one another and the orders were flashed from the flagship to the fighters, and from the Admiral's cabin to the shore, in spite of fog and great stretches of open water heaving between.

A lightship anchored off the coast of England was fitted with the Marconi apparatus and served to warn several vessels of impending danger, and at last, after a collision in the dark and fog, saved the men who were aboard of her by sending a wireless message to the mainland for help.

From the very beginning Marconi had set a high standard for himself. He worked for an end that should be both commercially practical and universal. When he had spanned the Channel with his wireless messages, he immediately set to work to fling the ether waves farther and farther. Even then the project of spanning the Atlantic was in his mind.

On the coast of Cornwall, near Penzance, England, Marconi erected a great station. A forest of tall poles were set up, and from the wires strung from one to the other hung a whole group of wires which were in turn connected to the transmitting apparatus. From a little distance the station looked for all the world like ships' masts that had been taken out and ranged in a circle round the low buildings. This was the station of Poldhu, from which Marconi planned to send vibrations in the ether that would reach clear across to St. Johns, Newfoundland, on the other side of the Atlantic—more than two thousand miles away. A power-driven dynamo took the place of the more feeble batteries at Poldhu, converters to increase the power displaced the induction coil, and many sending-wires, or antennae, were used instead of one.

On Signal Hill, at St. Johns, Newfoundland—a bold bluff overlooking the sea—a group of men worked for several days, first in the little stone house at the brink of the bluff, setting up some electric apparatus; and later, on the flat ground nearby, the same men were very busy flying a great kite and raising a balloon. There was no doubt about the earnestness of these men: they were not raising that kite for fun. They worked with care and yet with an eagerness that no boy ever displays when setting his home-made or store flyer to the breeze. They had hard luck: time and time again the wind or the rain, or else the fog, baffled them, but a quiet young fellow with a determined, thoughtful face urged them on, tugged at the cord, or held the kite while the others ran with the line. Whether Marconi stood to one side and directed or took hold with his men, there was no doubt who was master. At last the kite was flying gallantly, high overhead in the blue. From the sagging kite-string hung a wire that ran into the low stone house.

One cold December day in 1901, Guglielmo Marconi sat still in a room in the Government building at Signal Hill, St. Johns, Newfoundland, with a telephone receiver at his ear and his eye on the clock that ticked loudly nearby. Overhead flew his kite bearing his receiving-wire. It was 12:30 o'clock on the American side of the ocean, and Marconi had ordered his operator in far-off Poldhu, two thousand watery miles away, to begin signalling the letter "S"—three dots of the Morse code, three flashes of the bluish sparks—at that corresponding hour. For six years he had been looking forward to and working for that moment—the final test of all his effort and the beginning of a new triumph. He sat waiting to hear three small sounds, the br-br-br of the Morse code "S," humming on the diaphragm of his receiver—the signature of the ether waves that had travelled two thousand miles to his listening ear. As the hands of the clock, whose ticking alone broke the stillness of the room, reached thirty minutes past twelve, the receiver at the inventor's ear began to hum, br-br-br, as distinctly as the sharp rap of a pencil on a table—the unmistakable note of the ether vibrations sounded in the telephone receiver. The telephone receiver was used instead of the usual recorder on account of its superior sensitiveness.